Unreal Toolbox and Horde Agent deployment at scale on developers PCs

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hello,

in our company we want to replace SN-DBS with UBA and do it at scale, currently we use UBA only on build machines because it comes bundled with the Horde Agent, but now we want to start deploying UBA also on developers PCs so they can help when they are idle.

How does Epic manage the deployment of Horde Agents on developers PC?

We tried on a subset of machines to push the Horde Agent .msi automatically using some IT tools, but then the Unreal Toolbox would not detect the Horde Agent being installed because the .json metadata of it being installed through the Toolbox is obviously missing and the [Add] button is showing even when the Horde Agent is already installed (sometimes clicking the Add button would fix it, but this means doing it manually on every developer machine)

Do you just tell your developers to install the Toolbox and setup manually the Horde Agent by themselves on their machine?

How do you manage pushing Horde Agent updates to developers PCs? Admin is needed to install and update the Horde Agent, so you give Local Admin to developers and/or to the Toolbox?

Thanks

2

Hey there,

Admittedly, UnrealToolbox is still very much in an experimental phase, so any feedback you have would be much appreciated. I can only speak from my limited usage of it:

  • We have administrator accounts on our machines
  • Upon installation of Unreal Toolbox, we connect to the Horde server containing the build of Unreal Toolbox
  • Automatic updates are managed via this connection to Horde
    • unreal-toolbox tool id is required in Horde (I, II) - w.r.t. updates of the tool itself; the same is true for any other tools managed by Toolbox
    • Posting new tools will result in the autoupdate within UnrealToolbox being initiated here in ToolsCatalog.

For posterity, Carl has answered a bit of a scale question for build farm context *Agent* updates [Content removed] but admittedly Toolbox is still in it’s infancy with respect to deployment to developer machines.

I hope this clarifies a bit of how our updates work (primarily through Horde), and that we do indeed have admin on our developer machines (which probably make it easier for privileges on the dev machine).

Kind regards,

Julian